Mafalda SFU perpetual beta (AKA 1.0)

After exactly three years of development, lots of awake nights (and sunshines), and uncountable hours of debugging and testing, we are proud to announce today, April 1st 2024, that we have completed Mediasoup aggregated scalability and stability tests, and we are ready to publicly release the first feature complete version of Mafalda SFU. In other words, at last Mafalda SFU has got “1.0 version” status 🥳

This has been a huge milestone, so between highs and lows during these last three years (including some hiatus periods due to professional or personal reasons), we have finally reached the point where we can say that Mafalda SFU is ready for any kind of production use case, being that by having lots of small sized rooms each one under a single CPU capacity limits where horizontal scalability is the best fit, one or several medium sized rooms making use of several CPUs from a single server (vertical scalability), up to having one or several big sized rooms extending over multiple servers where aggregated scalability shines. Also, the high modularity of Mafalda SFU (at this moment we have 11 main projects, and 73 repositories on GitHub between public and privates ones) allows us to adapt to any kind of use case and architecture, and to evolve over time with your future requirements.

Now you would be asking, “why are you calling it ‘perpetual beta’ if you are releasing a 1.0 version?” Well, there are three reasons for that (three is a magic number 🎶):

1. First of all, as part of our commitment to be 100% API compatible with Mediasoup, we automatically check three times a day for new Mediasoup releases and pass all our project tests against them (and also, we pass all Mafalda SFU projects against Mediasoup tests themselves) for each new version, so instead of following semantic versioning, we make and publish a new release of all Mafalda SFU projects from their git main branches every time a new Mediasoup version is released, with all both Mediasoup and Mafalda SFU features and bug fixes up to that date. This way, the version number warrants the compatibility of each Mafalda SFU package with the exact same Mediasoup version.
2. We are not going to stop developing Mafalda SFU: we have a lot of ideas not only about how to improve Mafalda SFU reliability and performance (and they are already pretty high!), but also about new features and projects in mind that we want to implement, like monitoring tools, offering Mafalda/Mediasoup as a Service (MaaS) in addition to our current on-premises approach, or even decentralized P2P streaming on top of Mediasoup over multiple regions in the world.
3. And finally, we are going to keep the “perpetual beta” status as a reminder that we are always looking for feedback, and we are always open to new ideas and improvements, so if you have any suggestion, idea, or you want to collaborate with us, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

And if you are questioning yourself: no, this is not an April Fools’ joke, we are really releasing Mafalda SFU 1.0 today, we just wanted to make you think it 😉 So, if you want to know more about Mafalda SFU, please visit our website, or if you want to contact us, please write us to info@mafalda.io.